Tour of ChongMing Island

This week we talk through the events in China at the Tour of Chongming Island. We catch up on Marianne Vos’ first win of the season. We take a look at the Women’s Tour of California (aka The Breakaway From Heart Disease Women’s Race presented by SRAM). We catch up on the latest news from BMX and we take a few minutes to reflect back on the last five years of podcasting. That’s right, it’s our FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY EPISODE! There’s plenty of good things (and a couple of things that induce ranty swearing) to remind ourselves of. There’s even time to play the “if I had a time machine and were insanely rich how would I help the sport” game (the rules are easier than the name). So strap yourselves in and enjoy! (54:57 MIN / 53.01 MB)

As usual, the post below includes things we talked about this week, but also videos, articles and links to things we didn’t get around to.

Iurreta-Emakumeen Bira, 17th-21st May, Spain, UCI 2.1. The last stage will be streamed live, maybe with daily highlights too and I’ll tell you how to watch nearer the time. Follow the excellent race twitter and the #Bira hashtag (that also has lots of photos of beer in it!).

The Tour of Chong Ming Island, 5-7th May

This is the ninth round of the Women’s WorldTour, and the first to leave Europe. Three stages on ChongMing Island, in the Yangtze River, connected to Shanghai by tunnel and bridge. It’s definitely one for the sprinters, completely flat, and with the Island being 80km long and 18km wide, there’s not much variety in the course – but the nature reserves on the island make it really interesting to watch.

It’s live on Chinese TV station CCTV5, with streams popping up, posted by ProCyclingStats and Peter van der Veen, but be aware, my virus guards won’t let me into the streams because of malware.

You can also get very occasional updates on twitter, with the results and a couple of photos, on the UCI WorldTour twitter, and the #UCIWWT and #ChongMingIsland hashtags. I can’t find a website with timings on it, but the UCI twitter is helpfully posting things like start times and route maps. There will be daily highlights on the UCI YouTube as well, like this, from Stage 1, and on the Wiggle High5 YouTube.

Can you believe it’s been four years since we started this crazy adventure of doing a podcast about women’s cycling? Sarah and Dan take a moment to celebrate how far women’s cycling has come in that time and to reminisce a little about how they got here. From that we launch fully into catching up on the racing from the Tour of ChongMing Island, Vuelta Feminin Costa Rica, Tour of the Gila, BMX World Cup, para-cycling, the latest from the Lotto Cycling Cup and more. It’s been an amazing week to witness the growth and globalisation of cycling, and we’re putting it all down to the birthday of the podcast.

Round 7 of the 2016 Women’s World Tour was the first to leave Europe – and the first stage race of the Tour, which was always going to be interesting. The Tour of ChongMing Island is a flat one, for sprinters – and after all the big teams turning out for each of the Classics, the dynamics change, as traditionally there have always been big name teams and riders that have missed out China from their schedule. This is for a range of reasons – cost, for the small teams; sponsor priorities, for others; and everything from riders not wanting to risk food contamination, to the timing of the race, where a lot of top riders are taking a break right now, to recover from the Classics and look ahead to big season targets like the Giro and the Olympics.

Some people wish all teams were mandated to race all World Tour races, as a result, but I really disagree. I’ve loved the Classics season, but I also loved how, when stage racing started, the peloton has split, and there are opportunities for more riders and teams to shine – and ChongMing demonstrated this, although it does make me question the meaning of the World Tour – it’s not the best races in the world, but again, I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, especially as the new series format gave us significant media from the race, for the first time ever – in the past we’ve had to rely on Wiggle High5 for any visuals, with the maximum ever being short stage clips.

So without further ado, on to the racing! Photos on the UCI website, and more photos on a Chinese news site – and coming up, highlights, full race replay and Wiggle High5 team videos, in that order, with results and more from each of the three stages…

6-8th May 2016

This is a short one. Of course I understand that the social media situation is different in China than in most other countries, so it’s harder to follow a race in China than in Europe, or Argentina, or Thailand, or Qatar, and so on, but it’s that incongruous situation where we’re at the UCI Women’s World Tour #7, the Tour of ChongMing Island, and we’re not going to get to follow it so easily.

Now, there is a livestream that will show 1.5 hours of racing each day, from Chinese channel CCT5, and there are other streams into that from outside China – BUT my Mac virus guard isn’t letting me get to those pages, as it says there’s malware so I’m obviously not pushing that – but Your Mileage May Vary, make your own choices! The links to the streams are at the bottom of the Road & Mud preview, which has all the other information (In brief? It’s pancake flat, it’ll be sprinty, and very hard for escapes to get away). There’s another preview on Ella Cycling Tips.

We can pick up some other live information through the #ChongMing hashtag on twitter, and of course the #UCIWWT – and Vélofocus is out there, taking photos, so follow him too. As always, the best startlist is Cycling Fever’s – and remember, ChongMing is UTC +8 (UK BST +7, Euro CEST +6, USA EDT +12, Australian AEST -1) so if the livestream starts at 14:00 local time, that’s 6am BST, 07:00 CEST, 1am EDT and 3pm AEST). I guess we’ll find out more after the finish!

So, usually in the week after a Road World Cup, I’d be putting up the 26 minute UCI highlights video, having already put up a post with their short highlights video and photos, race reports and more the day after the race. But, while it was the 2015 Tour of ChongMing Island World Cup on Sunday, we won’t be having anything from the UCI this year. Why? I have no idea. They gave us all of that last year, and a short video in 2013, so if you want to see any moving images from this year’s race, all you can do is look at Wiggle Honda’s video.

It’s frustrating, because while the UCI talks about how women’s cycling media is their priority, but so far this year we’ve much had less overall than we did last year, even when eg the Ronde van Drenthe was streamed in Dutch. And it’s especially frustrating, because ChongMing, being in China, is so much harder to get information on than the other rounds, and has additional obstacles for teams racing there, from travel and visa issues through to riders having to be hyper-vigilant not to eat contaminated meat. I have to wonder why the UCI think teams will continue to go through all of that to race there, when even the governing body has the race on a lower tier than all the other World Cup. Sure, there are points, but ChongMing never impacts on the overall World Cup which is, I’m sure, a reason why teams like Boels-Dolmans, Rabo-Liv, Velocio-SRAM, Liv-Plantur and ORICA-AIS skipped it this year.

I decided this was the best time to retell what happened after my latest phone conversion with the UCI, which has kind of concluded the case. I was advised that taking legal action against my former team would be costly and high risk and simply not worth doing seeing as I already have missed nine months salary. So that option has gone. As this has taken so long, my second option to pursue payment via the UCI Bank Guarantee put in place under the UCI rules was also not an option, as that has now expired. In any case, the UCI informed me it was likely the bank guarantee for the team was never in fact set up and even if it was, it is so difficult to communicate with the Mexican Federation and the fact that there be other creditors owed this money, that this isn’t really an option and that is impossible to receive.

Ugh. So much wrong with this – the only bright spot is how impressed I am with Lucy for speaking out, because as I’ve written before, there is huge pressure on riders to keep quiet when they’re exploited (and not only financially, but also sexually, I’m still horrified about that), and last year was at least the third year I’d heard rumours that riders on a Faren team were unpaid.

So, I think I’ll stop typing now, because it’s all so depressing. There are bright spots – confusedspider just pointed out there are 2015 RaboLiv videos on vimeo that I hadn’t known about, and there’s some great racing set to be streamed, or watched on replay this week – crits and MTB – and on Monday there’s live video from the USA National Championships. So it always could be worse! But still, if you want me, I’ll be the one in the corner with my head under a blanket, feeling miserable.

It’s an awesome episode this week as we discuss We talk ChongMing Island Tour and World Cup, Tour of California, Venezuela and European racing. It’s big! We also play a fantastic game called “How many continents can Sarah offend in one podcast?” Place your bets now and press play to find out if you’re right! Also, at some point Dan uses the word “apace” (true story)! (1:17:55 MIN / 74.82 MB)